An intimate McNamara

THE FOG OF WAR: ELEVEN LESSONS FROM THE LIFE OF ROBERT S. MCNAMARA (2003)

Reviewed by Jerry Saravia

The most dangerous periods in recent U.S. history were the Cuban Missile Crisis of 1962 and the Vietnam War. The most dangerous man who almost made a grave error in judgment in Cuba (and arguably Vietnam) was former Secretary of Defense Robert S. McNamara. Some considered him arrogant, others called him brilliant. The beauty of Errol Morris's "The Fog of War" is that you have to make up your own mind of the man's character and his service.

Robert Strange McNamara was Secretary of Defense under the Kennedy and Johnson administration. This was a man who had to contend with the Cuban Missile Crisis and Vietnam, as well as make quick decisions on the right strategy of command, especially in a war that costed upwards the lives of 50,000 Americans. Russia was involved with giving Cuba up to 160 nuclear weapons. The U.S. had to decide whether or not to attack Cuba with missiles within a tense 13 day-period in October.

As for Vietnam, it was a war that shouldn't have happened considering that Kennedy was going to withdraw American troops (though it is a fact that he almost considered keeping them their as well). After Kennedy was assassinated, Johnson sent in more troops than necessary, all presumably to liberate Vietnam from a communist takeover. McNamara didn't want this war to happen, knowing firsthand how many lives could be unreasonably lost.

What's fascinating about McNamara is his acknowledgment that mistakes were made, and he learned from them (the film is broken up into 11 important lessons about war). He is astonished to later discover that Cuba really did possess several nuclear weapons. He is also mystified that no torpedoes were really deployed against "The Maddox," a U.S. destroyer in the Gulf of Tonkin, thus ensuing justification for a more rapid advancement against Vietnam. McNamara also expounds on having served in World War II and allowing the bombing raid of Tokyo, reducing that city to ashes since so many buildings and houses were made of wood (100,000 lives were lost in a single night). Through it all, we sense McNamara wished he had not taken part in decisions that he did not agree with. In a chilling moment, he admonishes the bombing of so many Japanese cities, not to mention dropping two nuclear bombs, and claims that if the U.S. did not win, they would have been branded as war criminals. He states very clearly that whether they had won or lost, it was still an immoral action.

Director Errol Morris ("The Thin Blue Line," "Mr. Death") shot this documentary using a video device called "Interrotron," which somehow allows the interview subject to make eye contact with the interviewer. What it also does is allow McNamara to look into the camera, and the audience can judge who he is more closely, more intimately. Morris does employ hundreds of jump cuts, which will drive you crazy and make you climb up the walls of the Pentagon. This distracts much of what McNamara has to say, as if every phrase spoken was a soundbite. Still, Morris makes up for it by inserting footage of a young McNamara describing his daily briefings, footage of air raids and bombings, dominoes falling into place over maps, and so on.

"The Fog of War" is the ideal documentary that is also the antithesis to Michael Moore's own docs, an unbiased focus on one man's controversial job in the machinations of war. Is McNamara a war criminal or did he just simply do his job? Should he have admitted his mistakes more readily in Vietnam? It's hard to say but the question lingers.

What is a platform?

THE CANDIDATE (1972)

Reviewed by Jerry Saravia

If Abraham Lincoln had to endure the modern political process, he surely would have lost. Today, thanks to the advent of television, a political candidate has to look good regardless of politics. Michael Ritchie's "The Candidate" is a smart, satiric view of this process, and the casting of Robert Redford is tantamount to the film's success.

A Republican conservative named Crocker Jarmon (Don Porter) is running for Senator of California, stressing family values and community relations. Redford is Bill McKay, an idealistic lawyer interested in grass roots issues and the environment. He is also the son of former governor John J. McKay (Melvyn Douglas), initially a supporter of Jarmon. Democratic campaign manager Marvin Lucas (Peter Boyle) takes an interest and a risk: he wants Bill to run for Senator as well. Lucas gets Howard Klein (Allen Garfield) to create the political ads as part of the media campaign. Everything is in place, though McKay senses how superficial it is from the onset. Lucas tells McKay that he will lose, but the ratings in the polls are getting higher than Jarmon's. This McKay looks like a movie star and he has the sincerity to persuade people to vote for him. It takes a while before he can understand the process: when asked about his platform by the press, he responds, "What is a platform?"

"The Candidate" is chock full of details about the political process. When a fire brews in a Californian forest, McKay makes a statement about the environment in a somber manner. When Jarmon arrives, he takes over full force with his charisma and his hope that families and firefighters are protected. We also see the different political ads, how they are edited and how certain phrases are dropped (it is no surprise that Lucas and company are not crazy about McKay's preaching on the environment). We also see how these politicians approach people, shaking hands with people they don't really know, and so on. There is also a character detail that is wisely not magnified: McKay's affair with a groupie. And we see how the tense Lucas handles McKay, sometimes addressing issues in bathrooms to avoid the public. There is also the general makeup of McKay's wife, dressing her up for photo shoots.

As written by political speechwriter Jeremy Larner (who won an Oscar), "The Candidate" always maintains interest in its understanding of the machinations and manipulations of the political process. Robert Redford heads the cast as the idealistic, naive lawyer who actually believes that he can make a difference, but how can he if his campaign manager and others handle him more than he ever could? His issues are not as important as how he addresses them. And when the inevitable ending occurs, we see McKay as a lost soul, realizing that he may win. The sullen look on his face and his last memorable line ("What do we do now?") shows that he is now corrupted - the media and the administration have taken over.

A superb cast (including Boyle in one of his best roles), a realistic, fully vital script and an ambiguous ending (with no clear political agenda), "The Candidate" is a reminder of how satire used to be portrayed in the movies - play it straight and with restraint and it will bite.

The race to nowhere

THE CANNONBALL RUN (1981)

Reviewed by Jerry Saravia

 I'll make this quick and easy to digest: this is a rotten film. It is so slipshod, so mangled in its camerawork and editing, so desperately unfunny that I can't quite put it any other way. The virtues of this film is singular: Burt Reynolds has his boyish charm - that's it. He proved it in "Smokey and the Bandit" and through the early part of the 1980's, he kept trying to prove it ("Stroker Ace" was the nadir of Reynolds' career, if you ask me). But boyish charm with no inner life or character to play is not exactly a stroke of cinematic genius either in these Hal Needham flicks.

The pitfalls are as follows: Dom DeLuise is grating in more ways than one, Farrah Fawcett shows she didn't fare any better than in her foolish "Charlie's Angels" series, Jackie Chan would probably rather continue his "Drunken Master" series, and Sammy Davis Jr. and Dino posing as priests might have wished they were performing in Vegas. Roger Moore and Jack Elam give the bare minimum of a story a spin. Other than that, the outtakes are much funnier. A shame it takes one hour and a half to get there.

Barnabas Collins returns to a drab manor

DARK SHADOWS (2012)

Reviewed by Jerry Saravia

Perhaps it is high time that director Tim Burton abandon his gray misty-skies, Universal Monster backlot crossed with "Nightmare Before Christmas" atmosphere that he has only rarely abandoned ("Big Fish" and "Charlie and the Chocolate Factory" seemed to have a more crisp Burton flair for the erratic and the unknown with a different palette of colors than anything of late). "Dark Shadows" is grayish and starkly lit visual porn - it is a sumptuous feast that could only occupy the world of the supernatural and, heck, Tim Burton does it best. As a movie, it also works in spades but it lacks that emotional punch that occupies some of Burton's finest films and it is wildly inconsistent from beginning to end.

Based on the soap opera vampire show of the early 1970's, Johnny Depp is Barnabas Collins, the elegant vampire of Collinswood Manor who was cursed by a devious, sexy and exceedingly menacing witch (Eva Green, in the performance of the movie). 200 years later, Barnabas emerges from a sealed tomb buried next to McDonalds and it is the early 1970's, not the 1700's. Barnabas returns to the manor, which is slowly eroding and a wreck with certains wings closed off, and plans to help the disbelieving Collins family with their once prosperous fishing business. Naturally, there is a competitor, Angelique, who tools around in a crimson red convertible and owns Angel Bay cannery, the stiff competitor for the Collins family.

There are some supporting players in the Collins family. There is the new prim and proper governess named Victoria (Bella Heathcote); Dr. Hoffman, the family shrink (Helena Bonham Carter with an orange hairdo); the family matriarch (Michelle Pfeiffer) and her brother, Brian (a curiously boring Jonny Lee Miller); Elizabeth's rebellious, Donovan Leitch-loving daughter, Carolyn (Chloe Moretz) who wants to run away to Manhattan, and there is the other child of the house, David (Gulliver McGrath), Brian's son.

"Dark Shadows" is lively and fun whenever Barnabas and Angelique torment, fight, discuss and make love to each other. The rest of the cast looks downbeat and rather drab, including Jackie Earle Haley as the manor's handyman. Michelle Pfeiffer can ignite a movie screen with her presence but here, she is misdirected to be so devoid of any tangible characteristics, you'll wonder if her character just had one too many stiff drinks.

The movie loses focus when it seems to center on the governess, then the Collins clan, then Barnabas and so on. Aside from Barnabas and Angelique, there is no character to latch onto, to have even the most remote empathy for. Burton and his writers also have an unwieldy screenplay that plays fast and loose with tone and near satire bordering on soap opera theatrics, and concludes with a finale that blends "Edward Scissorhands" with Burton's own "Batman" version sprinkled with a dose of werewolves, sculptures that are brought to life and a ghost (I do not recall any of this in the TV show of yesteryear but, who knows, my memory might be rusty). What begins as a Jane Austen horror fable turns into a minor monster pic, and then turns the tables into satire territory, before abandoning that completely and becoming a blood-soaked love story of spurned love and back into something else. A watchable picture and often deliciously fun (Johnny Depp is animated and engaging, partly contributing to the fun factor), but also a highly uneven picture.

Once upon a time, when Charlie Sheen crapped the big one

NAVY SEALS (1990)

Reviewed by Jerry Saravia

So imagine a movie where a group of armed soldiers, experienced in infiltrating terrorists, are called in at the most awkward moment - in the middle of a wedding ceremony. Imagine that one of these armed soldiers is played by Charlie Sheen, who is cocky and a real fighting machine. You can also imagine for the time being that he is aping Tom Cruise in "Top Gun" and that his fighting spirit is a result of endless hours of video game playing. In other words, it is a character far removed from the one Sheen played in Oliver Stone's "Platoon." 

So this cadre of Navy Seals are after Arab terrorists (who appear as generic as you can imagine, particularly in this post-9/11 climate) who possess an arsenal of Stinger missiles. Sounds timely, doesn't it? Imagine Sheen shooting every target and never missing. Also imagine Dennis Haysbert (who has seen better days since) as the only black SEAL who is killed (I don't mean to ruin it for you). Also imagine Bill Paxton appearing as the sharpshooter, along with Michael Biehn as another SEAL who tries to get inside information from a Lebanese journalist (Joanna Whalley-Kilmer, back when she made horrendous bad movies). Oh, lest we not forget that Paxton and Biehn appeared in the first "Terminator" movie. Just a thought that occurred to me while watching this movie.

The real Navy SEALS were formed in 1962 by President Kennedy and trained to be experts in all kinds of killing -- on sea, air or land. That fact alone should have merited a superior, more thought-provoking action picture than this "Rambo" wannabe. Maybe I am sick of these kinds of movies with explosions and bullets whizzing by in all kinds of point-of-view shots. Maybe it was the golfing montage. Or possibly the moment when Charlie Sheen jumps from a moving jeep on a bridge and lands in the water unscathed. If nothing else, mindless comic-book movies like this give comic-book movies a bad name.

Six Degrees of Drew Barrymore

MY DATE WITH DREW (2004)

Reviewed by Jerry Saravia

I suppose many of us have lifelong dreams. For those of us who were teenagers in the 1980's, there were dreams of meeting your favorite movie stars or your favorite rock stars. None of us probably thought much about more productive dreams, like world peace (as one keen observer in this film points out). Yeah, I would have loved to have met America's former sweetheart, Molly Ringwald, but a date with her? Not really. There is a separation from the reality of meeting a movie star and the realization that they are only human after all. "My Date With Drew," a charming documentary, never quite makes that distinction. Still, in "My Date With Drew's" 90-minute length, you'll probably be rooting for the main leading star to get a date with Drew Barrymore.

Essentially, that is what the documentary is about. Brian Herzlinger is an aspiring filmmaker who is fascinated and obsessed with Drew Barrymore. He wanted to meet her when he first saw her in "E.T." Then he joined a Drew fan club, and put up posters of mostly Spielberg films on his bedroom wall (No Barrymore film posters, though, except for "E.T.") Brian is desperate to meet her and, after winning some prize money on a TV contest show where the correct answer happened to be the actress, he decides to film his lifelong dream to meet Drew. Problem is he has 30 days to do it, ostensibly due to returning a video camera he bought at Circuit City which has a 30-day return policy. So Brian gets in physical shape, gets waxed, gets a facial, and even holds auditions for a Drew Barrymore lookalike so he can test a "dream date" scenario. Oh, boy.

Through many obstacles and potential run-ins, well, don't want to ruin it for you but you'll be in suspense. Brian is a charmer and a definite dreamer, but his point in meeting Drew is never made clear. Sure, he is not interested in a romance and clearly he is inspired by her, but the source of his inspiration beyond the fact that it is Drew Barrymore is ambiguous. Perhaps, she was the stepping stone to many of the events of Brian's life, or maybe they are soulmates in a six-degree-of-separation sense. Not much insight is provided in this area and not much criticism of his seemingly stalker proposition - his mother's only criticism is that Drew is a slut.

I liked "My Date with Drew" and I certainly enjoyed watching the immensely likable Brian and his determination. I was reminded of something though. I once saw Gene Hackman sitting on a curb outside the CCA theater in Santa Fe, NM. Everyone knew who he was and I clearly knew it was him. I could've asked for an autograph but I didn't. My feeling is that sometimes movie stars don't want to be bothered. Drew Barrymore may not care but it doesn't mean every movie star is as down-to-earth.

Kubrickian, Lynchian antihero

DONNIE DARKO (2001)

Reviewed by Jerry Saravia

"Donnie Darko" is a unique delight - a fast-paced, surreal oddity likely to leave audiences with lots of questions. And to make matters more interesting, it is a teen film, but not quite a romantic comedy or some sex farce with gross-out jokes that have become du jour. This is a thinking man's John Hughes picture crossed with the cleverness of something like "Back to the Future" and with enough preternatural events and sequences to remind us of David Lynch.

Jake Gyllenhaal plays Donnie Darko, a high-school teenager with mental problems and a supposedly schizophrenic side. He often talks to imaginary friends, and the latest is some person dressed in a bunny suit and an insect mask named Frank. Donnie's home life is normal for the most part. His parents (Holmes Osbourne, Mary McDonnell) are not the typical kind who argue and bicker at every convenience so that we are reminded they are a dysfunctional family. When Donnie curses at his sister (played by real-life sister Maggie Gyllenhaal), their mother simply says, "please stop," while the father grins. Meanwhile, every night Donnie sleepwalks and often leaves the house, ending up in hilly streets or golf courses. He takes medication, and sees a therapist (Katharine Ross) who frequently hypnotizes him. Then a strange event takes place. A fallen airplane engine crashes through Donnie's room. The plane in question minus an engine is never found. The event changes everybody. But Donnie sees this as some sign, as evidenced by Frank who tells him he has 28 days before the world will end in some sort of apocalypse. But is the bunny foretelling the future or the past? Who will listen to Donnie? His parents? His dubious physics teacher (Noah Wyle)? His English literature teacher (Drew Barrymore)? His new girlfriend (Jena Malone)? Or is the town's reclusive neighbor known as Grandma Death who has the answers?

Seeing the film twice, I realized how off the mark I was initially on Jake Gyllenhaal, whom some of you may remember from the nostalgic "October Sky." My first impression was that Gyllenhaal's performance was robotic and unfeeling, sort of a droopier-eyed version of Tobey Maguire. The truth is that he does give a fine performance, along with some low-angle stares that are reminiscent of similar, angry stares from Stanley Kubrick's films. It is a restrained performance of a teenager looking for answers and questioning authority. Gyllenhaal's Donnie character is nicely balanced between angry arguments with the family and quiet, reflective moments with his therapist. Also worth noting is his bemused smile when waking up in strange places - it adds to the film's hypnotic power.

This is writer-director Richard Kelly's first foray into filmmaking, and what a startling debut it is. He is a director that obviously relishes actors, in the same way that Cameron Crowe does. Kelly allows perfect use of close-ups when needed to allow us to identify with the family and especially with Donnie Darko. Mary McDonnell shows compassion with utmost sincerity as Donnie's mother, in contrast to Holmes Osbourne as Donnie's father who is detached and jocose. I also marvelled at Maggie Gyllenhaal who is as precious, sweet and sarcastic as any other sister I have seen in movies.

"Donnie Darko" has a questionable climax but I think it is in keeping with the movie's theme of how unexplained events can change a person, if not a whole family, even a small town. Donnie Darko is on to something - he is searching for meaning in life and in the universe (he has an interest in time travel). His girlfriend is searching for peace and beauty in the world. It is rare in movies today to see young people engaged in such rational, life-affirming thoughts. That is part of what makes "Donnie Darko" so refreshing.